Emily van der Schaaf - This Game Sucks

This Game Sucks, and it's up to the player to fix it!

You are a developer who's made a bad game, and have to fix it by playing your own game and purchase improvements that will make your game complete.

This game was made for my Graduation assignment, and was a test to see if it was possible to teach future game designers about how game feel works and how it can improve the overall quality of a game within a more standard entertainment game.

The game was a simple rogue-lite, focused on gunplay. At the beginning of the game, all "game feel features" would be taken away from the player, making the game feel much worse to play. Over multiple runs, the player would earn money during runs, and the player could use this money outside of runs to purchase these game feel features individually. These features include:

Movement acceleration
Blood spatter when hitting an enemy, for both clarity and impact
Increased bullet speed
Camera damping for smoother camera movement
Making the camera follow the mouse around the player
Interpolated player movement, smoothing out visual movement
Loot magnet, making drops by fallen enemies move towards the player when close
Screen shake when shooting, making the player's weapons feel more powerful
Damage flash, flashes the enemy sprite white for added clarity

The game feel shop

The player would usually purchase these upgrades one by one, improving the overall game feel of the game bit by bit. This was intended to showcase how important game feel is. The player could also enable and disable these features at will after purchasing them, both as an accessibility feature and also letting players test how the game changes in a separate test room.

For the graduation expo I made a more direct tutorial that lets players first use a feature when it's disabled, and enabling it afterwards to show them more directly how the game gets improved, with an NPC telling them directly how these changes can benefit a game. This was done to not require an expo guest to need play for at least 20 minutes to get to that point.

In the end, I'm comfortable saying that the concept succeeded, as playtests showed that upcoming designers could spot the improvements in the game and put into their own words how the changes were beneficial.

If I had more time for this project, I would've liked to set up the "Game feel library" a bit more, which would've contained a collection of animations showcasing the difference between having certain features enabled and disabled with full control over the animation speed. Maybe with some added text explaining more about the feature, and in what situations a designer could implement it.

prototype of Game feel libary